


Shadow City

by calliette



Category: Un Lun Dun - China Miéville
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-16
Updated: 2010-12-16
Packaged: 2017-10-13 17:18:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calliette/pseuds/calliette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Deeba's fifteen and should be studying, but the lure of Un Lun Dun - and of her friend Hemi - is too much to resist. When Hemi receives an urgent call to investigate the appearance of ghosts in a strange, impoverished city, Deeba has the opportunity to see both her closest friends in a new light.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadow City

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dharmavati](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dharmavati/gifts).



> With much thanks to 'n' for beta-ing.

December 20th found Deeba lying on a patch of grass clippings, basking in the light of the doughnut shaped un sun. Hemi sat cross legged next to her.

“Shouldn’t you be studying?” he asked playfully. It seemed his position of respectability was going to his head.

“You know it’s been snowing back in London. Snowing! I get one beautiful day in Un Lun Dun and you ask if I should be studying. Anyway it’s the holidays. And Zanna will help me with maths...”

“...and Lisa will print you duplicates of all her flashcards, so you just need to learn what’s on them; yes, I know. You’re lucky to have such diligent friends, not to mention the ability to skive off with the benefit of the phlegm effect. Yes, okay, you sunbathe, destroy your skin by the time you’re...”

“I put sunscreen on. There’s a lot of it round here in winter, remember. That’s why I have pale streaks all over my face.”

As she closed her eyes again, Deeba heard a loud buzzing sound. She scanned the sky in search of what new creature could be responsible. Then she saw what Hemi was holding.

“Is that a... that’s a fucking iPhone. Since when did you have an iPhone?”

Hemi shrugged in a manner that suggested he was a lot prouder of his possession than he was going to admit.

“A little while. A bunch of iPhone 3Gs started appearing about six months ago. No idea why…”

Deeba shook her head. “And to think I remember when there were just two phones in Un Lun Dun...”

“...and we had to make our own entertainment with a ball of string, two buttons, one of them broken, and... hey!” Hemi yelled as Deeba began to pelt him with handfuls of grass.

Then he looked at his iPhone and frowned.  Deeba stopped throwing. “Looks like I need to take a trip. Want to come?”

 

Deeba admitted the idea of Shadow City made her a little queasy. She was sure all the people there were very nice, really; just down on their luck, lost, disaffected, but it was hard to escape the stories people told of the abcity that had lost its city.

“We need to find a vessel.” Hemi muttered, as he walked at least three paces ahead of her, scouring the alley.  “This should do.” He pushed the old filing cabinet on its side and ripped out the one remaining drawer.

“.As London turns to paperless offices, Un Lun Dunners build boats. That makes a whole lot of sense.”

“You can fit in that space, if you bunch your knees up, right?”

“You’re not seriously planning to use that as a boat?”

“Yeah, sure.  I’ll just get some oars... of course it’s not a boat. We’re going by cable,.”

Deeba knew that the geography did not mirror her own world, but it still came as a surprise when they reached the ocean after less than an hour’s walk. Still, she was glad to be there; the metal had cut into her hand, and twice when they had stopped to rest the corner had fell on her foot.

 The two of them pooled some deutschemarks, and some even older New Zealand shillings to purchase a metal contraption in the shape of a capital B with a claw on each curve and a small tin of metal cement with which they attached the claw to the back of the filing cabinet.

At the docks, Deeba realised they could have made a worse choice for a vessel; others were there with wheelie bins, laundry baskets and suitcases. Two girls, both younger than Deeba, attached a claw to each of the two outbound cables as they clambered in to the already moving cabinet.

“Crap,” said Hemi.

“What?”

“I forgot about the water. Never made me comfortable, not this much at once.”

 

No-one was quite sure where Shadow City was - or had been- in the other world; most guesses put it in Western Australia or Southern Africa. Most agreed on the reason for its severance, though; right in the centre of town was a huge pit wheel, half sunken into the ground, lying on one side. Shadow City was the abcity of a gold rush town that had disappeared when the gold had dried up.  A massive influx of everything they owned that could not be taken with them fell through to the abcity, and then nothing.

Many denizens left Shadow City for work elsewhere. Some survived on aid from other abcities. Various industries were started and failed. No-one quite knew why the abcity survived; why the population, despite the huge amount of emigration, had remained more or less static for eighty years.

Hemi sat with his head between his knees, banging his head on the edge of the filing cabinet every time the cable swayed or stopped and started, while Deeba waved and called greetings to the passengers on the inbound side of the cables.

“Is it something to do with the Wraithtown population situation?” she asked. The past month had seen an unprecedented - an unexplained - decline in the number of inhabitants, despite no evidence of change in the London or Un Lun Dun death rates (“The death rate’s still one hundred percent,” Zanna would say).

Hemi responded by hurling the contents of his stomach over the side of the filing cabinet.

“ _Real_ ghosts don’t vomit,” Deeba commented a little unkindly, pulling the iPhone out of his pocket when it buzzed. He didn’t look up to objecting.

Deeba still only semi understood the symbols that covered the screen, but she got the gist of the message. Ghosts were appearing in Shadow City. And, even stranger, the locals didn’t seem to be objecting.

 

Shadow City was a two hour ride from the docks on a hired Quagga - a creature Deeba had never seen before, but appeared to almost exactly resemble a horse with a head of a zebra. If Un Lun Dun was a mess of junk, Shadow City was composed of the dregs of that junk; the sort of stuff you find thrown out behind the charity shop when even they don’t want them. Houses were two sheets of corrugated iron that leaned against each other or a narrow canopy - say an old sheet - strung between two poles.

“I guess I shouldn’t have brought you...” Hemi began weakly.

Deeba stared him down viciously.

Their lodgings were in one of the nicest buildings in the abcity, composed of planks of wood - and the occasional street sign - haphazardly nailed together. A short walk down a dirt street they found an open to the air cafe with long wooden benches where they ate soup and bed, then returned and  settled in for the night - Deeba took the bed and Hemi curled up on the floor, using his coat as a blanket. In the morning Hemi would go and try to make contact with the ghosts, work out what was happening...

 

...they were woken too early, way too early. Deeba opened her eyes to clattering, shaking, shouting. She turned to look for Hemi but could see nothing except a flicker of a flame somewhere, perhaps far away, she wasn’t sure. Something snapped round her ankle. A hand. Then she was being dragged outside, onto the street. They were surrounded. She couldn’t see Hemi. She couldn’t scream.

 

“What do you know? What do you know?”

Deeba craned her neck. _Hemi_.

“Nothing.”

“Wrong answer. You need to tell us what you know.”

“I... know that there are ghosts here. And that immigration to Wraithtown has slowed. That’s all. I swear.”

Out of the corner of her eye Deeba saw them coming towards them. Ghosts, hundreds of them. Skin translucent. Eyes wide, almost empty. The people scattered. In the middle of them, her eyes flickering, head throbbing, the world seeming to fall further and further away from her, Deeba though she saw someone she recognised. Flashes of black and white. Blue. Scarf, no wrong word. Tie. Blonde hair. _Zanna_.

 

Deeba woke in a small room, lightened only by a stream of sunlight from a small window. There seemed to be four of everything, and everything was someone in a torn and dirty St Augustine’s uniform.

“Don’t try to move, Deebs.”

She fell backwards.

“How do you feel?”

“Sore.” Deeba screwed up her face. “Like I’ve crossed an ocean in a filing cabinet, ridden a Quagga and then been dragged along the streets of a city that shouldn’t exist. How... how are you here?”

Zanna grinned. “I guess I should have told you before. But I was sworn not to. Besides, I reckon I have my own personal phlegm effect. Not just when I go to Un Lun Dun, but always. Since I was a kid. It can be useful sometimes. Anyway, we have work to do.”

“Tell me.”

 

Zanna had known about Un Lun Dun for most of the past few years too; Book couldn’t tolerate his prophecies being wrong and had turned up at her flat in Kilburn to prepare her for some great moment of victory.

A moment she was still waiting for.

She’d been sick of waiting. She’d gone back herself. _I’m the_ _Schwazzy_ , she’d thought. But no-one remembered. For perhaps the first time in her life she wanted attention, this seemed to be the point at which it was most lacking. And then it was as if she were falling, but not through anything. Un Lun Dun seemed to disintegrate around her and without knowing what was happening she fell through to Shadow City.

 

Deeba sat upright in the bed. Her head felt as if it was going to explode, and she sat quickly back down. Hemi walked in, looked concerningly over her.

“Shadow City’s not the abcity of a place that no longer exists. Well, it might have started out that way, but now...”

“It’s Un Lun Dun’s abcity.”

Deeba quickly put two and two together. “Because people in Un Lun Dun have got so good at reusing rubbish, nothing gets forgotten. But what about the ghosts? Hemi’s been a great ambassador.” The last bit was almost defensive.

“Too good,” Zanna replied. “People only noticed them when they were scared of them. Of course, with most there were other ghosts that knew them, kept them around, but for some - well some people don’t handle death well and they didn’t really see anyone beyond the necessary...”

“Why did they come after us?”

“Because they thought the ghosts were the first things coming through, and soon they’d have technology and food and currency... They went after us because they were scared we were going to stop them.”

 

The ghosts were easy enough to handle, though it would take time. That was Hemi’s job, not so much having them mingle with other people, though that wouldn’t hurt, but making sure they all got to know each other.

Zanna pinned a page from Book, the edge of the page ripped by saddle-stitched veins, to a post in a centre of town. Just a few more months. The last prophecy.

Because just a few months later a sixteen year old girl on holiday would find something in a stream that caught her eye, a city, on the site of one forgotten would grow again and no-one there would notice as the abcities realigned themselves, or the celebration in Shadow City.

 

Shadow City’s library was old and almost deserted, most of the books lost or stolen, the shelves dusty. Zanna thought it was sad, but Deeba had other concerns, which were allayed when she found a shelving unit turned on an angle, half wedged in a hole in the ground. Anyone else would have considered it the result of vandalism, or perhaps exceptional clumsiness, but Deeba started climbing down, followed by her friends.

It ended somewhere a couple of meters above the Un Lun Dun library floor. Deeba wondered if anyone had ever noticed before.

“Excuse me?” she said, faintly the first time, then louder. No-one seemed to hear. Hemi threw his shoe against some shelves, which drew the librarian’s attention and she brought a ladder.

The climb back to London was much easier. The library was closed when they got there, but they managed to make an exit though a window.

“Why is it so quiet?” Hemi asked.

“Crap, it’s Christmas!” Zanna darted off, her gangly legs kicking up behind her, leaving Hemi no more enlightened.

“The red and green deer candles day?”

Deeba thought for a minute. “Yes, yes that one. It’s a holiday?”

“Won’t people be missing you? Your family?”

“It’s not one my family celebrates.”

“They don’t like green deer?”

Deeba giggled. At that point she couldn’t tell whether Hemi’s look of earnestness was genuine, or if he was mocking, but she liked the look anyway, the way the freckles stood out on his pale skin, the slight upturn of the corners of his mouth.

“Something like that. When we were kids mum and dad used to give us presents so we wouldn’t feel left out, but now we just do our own thing. Actually...”

“What?”

“It’s just last year I spent the whole day in my room, reading... stories... online. Some girls in my class were having a not-Christmas party, and I almost went but it felt good, just once, to have a day on my own. Once I might have minded that this was Zanna’s day, that she is the one to save Shadow City, but I’ve had so many adventures it feels okay that this isn’t about me. ”

“Well then, Deeba, I will leave you to another day on your own, and the knowledge you have once again saved a whole lot of people. See you soon.”

 

“Hemi.”

He turned, not yet three paces away from her. She realised that in the few years she had known him he had grown, he was an adult now, more or less, and she supposed that meant she wasn’t far off either. He grinned, his cap tilting to one side, the cheeky smile of the former extreme shopper, the ambassador, but most of all her friend.

“I didn’t want to say I wanted to be alone this year.”

When she kissed him, it was if the winter air was sucked away from them, and Deeba couldn’t think of anything else but the two of them, and that it might just be her day after all..


End file.
